You’ve fought hard, my grinchey friend, but despite all your best efforts, that time of year has rolled around once more. That’s right…it’s the Christmas season. For most people, that means belting out carols whilst buying up all the tinsel and holly they can find. But for you, dear grinch, the season means something different. For you the day after Thanksgiving marks the beginning of month-long misery. While everyone else cranks up their jolly-o-meter to level 9,000, you’d prefer to hide underneath your bed until Dec. 26, when the world has drained of it’s holiday cheer and finally realized that winter is the worst.
But, as much as you wish you could hole up in a cave like your namesake, you probably do have to live in the real world this month, at least from time to time. That’s why I’ve devised this foolproof list of creatively malicious ways for you to keep the holidays at bay for as long as possible and effectively convey to the sea of endless merriment that you don’t want to get into the “Christmas spirit,” whatever that may be.
1. Buy earmuffs
Simple, inexpensive and effective. No one will try to talk to you if you’ve got a pair of giant, fuzzy cushions over your ears all the time. In fact, it’s one of the easiest ways to wordlessly communicate to people that you have absolutely no interest in hearing about any part of their day/life/decoration drama. Get yourself a pair of earmuffs on Cyber Monday and spend the rest of the holiday season in blissful (and warm) silence.
WARNING: If you choose to go the earmuff route you cannot, repeat CANNOT, remove them at any time. Christmas music is all around during this dangerous season, and any ear exposure whatsoever might subject you to its traumatizing joy.
2. Get Barbed Wire
Like the earmuffs, this tactic takes a more passive aggressive route. Stringing barbed wire around your property is a great, subtle way to convey to the outside world that you have no intention of participating the annual holiday-decoration rat race, accepting carolers, or even exiting your property until sanity returns to the rest of the human race.
3. Decorate your house for Halloween
For the edgy grinch.
4. Buy all the Christmas trees in town and have a bonfire.
This tactic can also be employed with Christmas cookie dough, Christmas sweaters, Christmas movies, Christmas CDs, or any other holiday paraphernalia you can think of. Get creative and have some fun!
5. Carry air freshener
Christmas time can be treacherous not only for your ears, eyes, and mental wellbeing, but also for your nose. Just think about the myriad of unpleasant smells that accompany the month of December—gingerbread, pine, holly, the list goes on and on. Be sure to equip yourself with a more agreeable alternative whenever you go out. Less extreme grinches may only require a spritz of burnt-hair perfume, or post-Christmas tear mist every once and awhile, but those more sensitive to the season should keep a few bottles on themselves at all time, for safety reasons.
6. Record an anti-Christmas CD and distribute it wherever possible.
It’s important that a few brave, selfless grinches to venture into the wild and convert others to their ways. As Christmas cheer becomes more infectious each year growth of the faction becomes necessary for survival.
Some track suggestions: “Grandma Got Run Over by a Mac Truck,” “It’s the Most Horrible Time of the Year,” and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like the Apocalypse”
